Practice Makes Perfect: Assure Medication Accuracy by Expanding the Virtual Classroom

Medication reconciliation is a huge patient safety issue. More than four out of five adults in the United States take at least one medication, and almost a third take five or more different medications.¹ This leads to increased misuse, overuse or complication resulting in more than 3.5 million physician office visits, 1 million emergency room visits, and 125,000 hospital admissions each year.²

And while physicians, nurses and pharmacists bear a great responsibility in regulating medications, every clinician is responsible for ensuring safe and appropriate medication use.

Luckily, training your memory retention skills through practice can help to prevent medication discrepancies.

Learning is a Process

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. – Confucius

Learning is easy, right? It’s the simple process of moving information from out there – an online course, webinar or conference – to your professional practice. But sometimes – despite reading, listening and reviewing – the information doesn’t stick.

Learning isn’t a one-and-done deal. The human brain is an incredibly powerful mechanism, but it does have an Achilles’ heel: memory retention. Once learned, skills have to be practiced extensively before they are committed to long-term memory. This practice takes place almost entirely through your day-to-day interactions with patients and other healthcare workers.

Assuring Medication Accuracy through Transitions of Care

This may sound daunting, but there are techniques available to help you increase memory retention and drive improvements in your professional practice. Our new course, Assuring Medication Accuracy through Transitions of Care, dives deeper into these strategies.

The course includes techniques to reconcile patients’ medication histories, as well as factors that can lead to increased risk of medication misuse and ways for you to educate patients and their caretakers on medication risk management.

Additionally, included in this course are step-by-step instructions on how to improve the medication reconciliation process in your professional practice and a downloadable pocket guide for you to print off and use at your facility. Click below to take a look.

We know that learning is a process, not a one-time task. So our goal with this course is to expand the virtual classroom by providing the necessary tools to put your learning into practice and support doing what you love: providing high-quality care to your patients.